“So why don’t you use a smart phone?” she asked.

“It’s not for me,” he replied, looking across the table.  He saw the confused but intrigued eyes that looked back at him as a cue to continue.  “I like to be here.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking down quickly to her own smart device that had just flashed sitting on the table in front of her.  She then quickly looked back up at him and turned her phone over to face down on the table.

“Don’t worry about it,” he chuckled with compassion and sincerity.  “I just mean that when I’m with someone, or with a space, or where ever I am, I like to be completely there.  With that person, with that space.”

“Hm…” she responded, noticeably making an effort to maintain eye-contact and attention.  The gesture was appreciated.

“Do you know what I mean?  Do you see it around you?  With your friends?  I feel that the way we use these devices just takes us away from each other, from the moment,” he tried to explain.  His passion was beginning to well up inside of him, “I hang out with my friends now and everyone is off into a million different places.  We used to be there with each other, laughing, talking, and playing.  Now instead we are checking this sports score, or this piece of news, or this picture on social media, dividing our being into all these different channels to the point where we are really no where at all, almost as ghosts.”

“Interesting…” she responded.  “Can I see that?” she asked reaching across the table.  The man grabbed his flip phone off of the table and passed it over to her.  She flipped it open, quickly looked it over, flipped it back shut and reached over the table to pass it back.  As the man took it back she asked, “How do you text with that thing?”

“I don’t usually text,” he replied.  She looked back at him with the same intrigue, but now the hint of confusion replaced with one of solidity and fullness of being.  He again recognized the cue to continue, but aware that he let his passion take hold last time around, he resolved to remain at peace.

It was a conversation that always played out in his head and that he often initiated and re-initiated with many people; how to reconcile absolute truth, right-living, concepts of good and bad, healthy and unhealthy with individual truths and freedom- that the shoe that fits one pinches the other.  This inner dialogue meant he sometimes became passionate about his concepts of good and bad but had thus far been reverting always back to quietly living his own truth though admittedly wondering whether his resulting silence on issues of particular meaning to him really was for the greater good.

In any case, he made sure to attempt to make no offence and to express his opinion as one that was applicable solely to him, “I just don’t like the text message as a medium of communication,” he began.  “I find it cumbersome.  For me, it’s much easier to leave where I currently am for a couple of minutes, make a phone call, be fully there with that person for as long as we need to talk, and then come back to where I was.  I find that for me, text messages are just infinite streams taking me off the river.  What could be done in a minute phone call often takes a fifteen minute long text message conversation distracting me from what I’m doing.”

“And, for me personally, things that are said over text message would often never be said in person or over the phone.  Actions in lust or greed or other forms of vice were often initiated by me or towards me through text message where they never would have arose in person or by phone call.  Text messages have definitely caused myself and others that I’ve been involved with a lot of suffering.”

“I see… that’s interesting,” she repeated.

“I don’t know, that’s just me,” he reiterated.  “I just find it so crazy that everyone has one now.  That everyone has deemed them necessary.  In ten years it has become a necessity for everyone to have these thousand dollar products and their accompanying $100/month expenses and no one has really even batted an eye over how their use has developed or the implications that their use has had in our relationships with others, our world, or ourselves.  It’s crazy.  And what about ‘phone etiquette’?  I find that this really isn’t even a conversation; all of a sudden it just became socially acceptable to ignore the people around you and retreat into your phone to speak to someone else or pursue a whim of curiosity or emptiness that – suddenly – we cannot keep at bay.  We need answers to our questions or something to fill our void of loneliness, and we need them now.  It’s as if we forgot that we functioned perfectly fine since the beginning of humanity while having to wait till we got home to our computer, or to a library, or to a man of knowledge, or when there was no answer available to us at all.”

“And it’s not that I don’t see the magic in them.  They are extraordinary devices, they just aren’t for me,” he concluded.  It felt good for him to get that all out of his system.  He realized then that although people often made superficial teasing comments about his telephone choice, they rarely asked him why.  He switched the cross in his legs and sat with the woman in silence, both staring unfixed off in their own directions, absorbing the reaction that had just occurred between them.

“Why do you use a smartphone?”